NYC police chief Ray Kelly agrees that racial profiling is trivially defeated by terrorists and too dangerous to rely on:‘I think profiling is just nuts’
— NYC police chief
Ray Kelly
“If you look at the London bombings, you have three British citizens of Pakistani descent. You have Germaine Lindsay, who is Jamaican. You have the next crew, on July 21st, who are East African. You have a Chechen woman in Moscow in early 2004 who blows herself up in the subway station. So whom do you profile? Look at New York City. Forty percent of New Yorkers are born outside the country… Who am I supposed to profile?… Could a terrorist dress up as a Hasidic Jew and walk into the subway, and not be profiled? Yes. I think profiling is just nuts.” [Link]
The author of this New Yorker piece, Malcolm Gladwell, explains that a racial profile fails against an adaptive foe:
… what the jihadis seemed to have done in London [was that] they switched to East Africans because the scrutiny of young Arab and Pakistani men grew too intense. It doesn’t work to generalize about a relationship between a category and a trait when that relationship isn’t stable—or when the act of generalizing may itself change the basis of the generalization. [Link]
Kelly had previously eliminated ineffective profiling in the U.S. Customs Service:
… he overhauled the criteria that border-control officers use to identify and search suspected smugglers. There had been a list of forty-three suspicious traits. He replaced it with a list of six broad criteria. Is there something suspicious about their physical appearance? Are they nervous? Is there specific intelligence targeting this person? Does the drug-sniffing dog raise an alarm? Is there something amiss in their paperwork or explanations? Has contraband been found that implicates this person?
You’ll find nothing here about race or gender or ethnicity, and nothing here about expensive jewelry or deplaning at the middle or the end, or walking briskly or walking aimlessly. Kelly removed all the unstable generalizations, forcing customs officers to make generalizations about things that don’t change from one day or one month to the next…After Kelly’s reforms, the number of searches conducted by the Customs Service dropped by about seventy-five per cent, but the number of successful seizures improved by twenty-five per cent. [Link]
Like I said, search for bombs, not people. You’d think Gladwell would favor judgments in a blink, but not so. He sees parallels to the city of Ottawa banning pit bulls after some of them attacked a baby. The dogs were owned by an Ottawan named Shridev Café, which sounds more like a pakora bar than a negligent pooch owner:
… the city could easily have prevented the second attack with the right kind of generalization—a generalization based not on breed but on the known and meaningful connection between dangerous dogs and negligent owners. But that would have required… a more exacting set of generalizations to be more exactingly applied. It’s always easier just to ban the breed. [Link]
‘Ban the breed’ leads the Sepias for Worst Metaphor of the Year. But hey, it’s only February.
